Change Sucks: but the results are fun (sometimes)

Living more frugally when in debt or overshoot is a sane and moral choice. The more of us who make this choice, the faster the collective transformation will go. We are at a crossroads. Disaster is not inevitable, but we need to change.
--Vicki Robin
Learn more about Your Money or Your Life and the Financial Integrity movement

I hate change.

Seriously. Change is exhausting and scary and difficult and I don't like it one bit.

The fact that change brought me the love of my life, a new place to call home, and maybe even some sense of peace (sometimes) is really quite beside the point. Change sucks.

But change is the only way to live--each of us is conceived, is born, lives, and dies eventually of something. It's all change.

Now, you can try to make change less painful in an awful lot of ways. You can work as hard as you can, sacrificing everything in the pursuit of something to make the change "worth it"--accrue tons of money so that you can always "have enough" and never have to worry. You can concentrate on saving the world--spend all your time sacrificing for the greater good; stop eating meat, fruit, whatever is the environmental baddie of the day; stop using plastic, aluminum, steel, wood, air; stop using the internet, the television, the car, the bike, your shoes--making sure that future generations can enjoy the earth (because you didn't).

In other words, you can try to take control of a fundamentally uncontrollable situation, hoping to make yourself feel safer.

But the truth is, you'll never feel safe, and I'd posit that life isn't about feeling safe anyway--at least not in that way. Life is about living, which is one of those hopelessly hokey things people put on bumper stickers, but it's true.

The problem with life being about living is that everyone has a different idea of what "living" entails. Is living having a fancy car and a fancy house and eating at five star restaurants every night? Is it acquiring as much "stuff" as you can get, so that you can say "I have enough to live on if everything collapses"? Is either of these ways of life fundamentally wrong--or right--for anyone and everyone?

The world itself will eventually make this determination for all of us. Currently, we as a species are living like we've got four or five spare planets tucked away, just waiting for us to pull them out of mothballs once we've used up the resources on this one. I found it interesting that the hundreds of thousands who jammed the Washington Mall to watch Barack Obama advocate change and a turning away from childish things managed to leave 120 tons of trash in their wake. This is not change I can believe in.

Eventually, the world will stop us itself. Crops fail every year, for a variety of reasons, and we look to technology to stop these disasters. We engineer crops that withstand a certain plant virus--then grow hectare after hectare of them, making them vulnerable to some other plague. We create new pesticides to stop this plague, killing off beneficial bacteria whose job it is to keep plague #3 in check. We "reintroduce" said bacteria to the soil, further disturbing the balance... It goes on and on and eventually, the earth is going to win and we're not going to be able to grow anything on that land, because it just plain needs time to heal.

We do much the same with every resource we have, but here's a thought: What if we, for starters, used less resources? This is not to say that we don't actually need to feed the billions of people on this planet, but what if we decided that we didn't need lemons from Florida in the dead of winter in the northern midwest (and yes, I'm talking about myself here)? That would mean less gas used to get the lemons from there to here, less monoculture in the agriculture landscape there, and more support of the farmers here in the midwest, who grow a mean winter cabbage and a variety of other winter greens that will satisfy my vitamin C requirements admirably.

What if, instead of using acres and acres of farmland for endless crops of corn to be used for ethanol, we instead stopped driving quite so much? Less driving, less ethanol, more room for food crop. And what if we as consumers were a bit more diverse and discriminating in our choice of foodstuffs? The farmer who once grew only one type of corn on his 150-acre farm could now grow five or ten different crops, rotating his crops in and out of each field and increasing the growing power and stability of the ecology of his own local soil. At the same time, he'd increase the nutritional content of the local diet and make sure that people could satisfy themselves with local food, using fewer food miles and coming back full circle to driving less, using less ethanol/gasoline/electricity, and improving the local agriculture.

No Impact Man posted a blog entry recently in which he commented that "we [environmentalists] should joke around more." I love both the cartoon and the sentiment. Because the flip side of the ethical and environmental snarl I've just written about is the joy of living well.

Now, living well can definitely mean spending $300 on one meal for two (say, your Valentine's Day blowout). I'm not into spending that much for a meal, myself--but don't ask me how much I spend on the mortgage to my beautiful condo on the beach. I spend my money on housing, because I "need" to see the water. Which is also living.

Living well can also mean spending a rainy day inside on the couch with a cup of tea and a good book. Heck, you don't even need to have bought that book--that's what libraries are for! Now, you can think about where that tea came from, where the cup came from, where the library got the book and how much, ecologically-speaking, it cost to make it, or you can just let go of your eco-guilt for a minute and enjoy the fact that you have a roof over your head and a good book in your lap.

And the next day, maybe you can remember how nice that day was--a day when the most consuming thing you did was, maybe, turned on the stove to heat some water and the light to see the print when it got dark, and think "maybe that's a good way to live more often than not."

Maybe buying your child fewer toys and offering him more attention is a good way to live. Maybe making a homemade meal with local foods you never even knew your area had is a good way to live. Maybe walking to the store that's only a mile away and not buying more than you can carry home is a good way to live. More often than not.

And if that change in thought--and change is hard--saves some money, or some resources, or some stress... Then maybe change doesn't need to suck quite so much all the time.

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Today, you get an ecological link, just because it's Friday!

• A Skyscraper Grows in New York City: The Vertical Farm Project is researching the sustainability and feasibility of building high rise gardens in metropolitan areas. The result could be a decrease in average food miles, a greater connection between the city dwellers and their food, and even the possibility of farms that not only supply their own power and water, but give some back to the community, as well! This project is, in my mind, the next building I want shooting up in my backyard!